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July 18, 2007, 03:34 PM ET
Duke U. Says iPhones Are Messing Up Its Wireless Network
Duke University administrators are big fans of the iPod. But their assessment of the iPhone, Apple's new attraction, is not as glowing: The cellphones seem to be wreaking havoc with the campus's wireless network.
Several times over the past week, up to 30 of Duke's wireless routers have blacked out, usually for about 10 minutes at a time. They were being inundated with as many as 18,000 MAC address requests per second, reports Network World.
Duke officials finger iPhones as the culprits. About 150 of the devices are already registered on the campus network, and it appears many of them may be repeatedly firing off invalid router requests. The likely problem: iPhones that were first connected to the Web through home wireless routers may be furiously trying to reconnect to those local outposts rather than to the campus network.
Duke can be thankful for the iPhone's summertime launch: For the time being, the snafus amount to a real nuisance, not a catastrophe. Clearly, though, the university will have to come up with a fix before students -- some with iPhones in tow -- reach the campus for the fall semester. Duke's tech staff has sought help from Apple and from Cisco, the company that makes the university's routers.
Has your college emerged unscathed from the dawning of the iPhone era, or do you have other problems to share? Let us know. --Brock Read
Categories: Leadership
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